Areca ARC-1680ix-16 SAS RAID Controller Review. Page 11

Back in the days, Areca ARC-1220 controller made such a great impression on us that we continued using it in our lab for a long time. We wonder if the new SAS RAID controller, which we will review today, manages to repeat the success of its predecessor.

Conclusion

Areca has almost managed to hold its honorable and obliging title of the maker of very good RAID controllers. We say almost because we do not like the problems with writing to 4-disk RAID10 and RAID6. Besides, the controller’s efficiency in choosing the luckier disk in a mirror pair is not perfect and it might be faster at processing small files. Hopefully, the manufacturer will address these issues in firmware updates.

The good thing about this controller is that it is fast and stable under server loads and has no rivals at processing large files. It can also effectively parallel multithreaded load between disks of mirror pairs. Summing it up, the Areca ARC-1680 seems to be an excellent choice for a high-load file server.